


A Happy Hephaestus Holiday

by MayContainBlueberries



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Christmas Fluff, Gen, Previous Hephaestus Crew, Warnings for gratuitous sillyness, weird food
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-13
Updated: 2015-12-13
Packaged: 2018-05-06 13:04:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5418149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MayContainBlueberries/pseuds/MayContainBlueberries
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The crew celebrates Christmas. Do they sing carols? You betcha. Is there a Christmas Tree? After a fashion. Does Lovelace teach her crew the true meaning of Christmas? Find out...</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Happy Hephaestus Holiday

**Author's Note:**

> A Secret Santa gift for [bubblymoth](http://www.bubblymoth.tumblr.com).  
> This is hands down the silliest thing I have ever written. It is just incredibly silly. Good luck.   
> This takes place early in the Hephaestus 1.0 mission, before anyone dies or anything. Does that even work with the timeline? WHO KNOWS!

“I hope you are ready for the best goddamned Christmas dinner of your lives,” is not quite what Captain Lovelace said, but was more or less what Fourier had been hearing for the past week or so. And here it was, the 25th of December. Lovelace had commandeered the entire physics lab (no-one wanted to have Christmas dinner in the bio lab where Doctor Selberg did his experiments), and was not allowing anyone in on pain of forceful ejection into the void of space. Doctor Selberg was trying to find something resembling a Christmas tree in the greenhouse. Fisher had rigged up strings of lights using spare bulbs (Lambert had complained about that: “Those are for emergencies!” “Sam, we have enough spare bulbs to last us three years! We’re never going to need all of them!”). Rhea was learning Christmas carols.

When Lovelace had announced their crew Christmas dinner two weeks previously, Fourier had assumed that was all she’d hear about it until the day of. But instead the station had transformed into a peppermint scented, sparkling pre-Christmas time bomb. Metaphorically speaking. The only peppermint was in their carefully rationed toothpaste.

So it was a bit of a relief to most of the crew when Christmas day rolled around. At 1730 hours, the crew gathered outside the physics lab, equal parts exasperated and anticipatory.

Lovelace floated down towards them, looking like she was born moving about in zero g. She was wearing a Christmas sweater. Fourier wondered how she had wrangled the space allowance for _that_.

“Merry Christmas crew!” Lovelace exclaimed. She looked as excited as a child on, well, Christmas.

“Regulations say that there should be one member of the crew on duty at all times,” Lambert said snippily.

“Even regulations have to take time off at the Holidays,” Lovelace countered. “Anyway, Rhea’s keeping an eye on everything. Right Rhea?”

Rhea beeped her agreement.

“So without any further ado,” Lovelace continued, “let’s get this party started!” She flung open the door to the lab.

Hui actually gasped quietly. Fourier smirked at him.

Admittedly, the room had transformed quite a bit. Their computers and equipment were all squirreled away on the walls, with strings of lights looping around them. An EVA suit bobbed gently in one corner with a Santa hat tied to its helmet (again Fourier thought, how did this get on board?). The piece de resistance, though, was Selberg’s “Christmas Tree”.  It was green and leafy and had big thick branches twisting every which way and looked absolutely nothing like an evergreen. Tinfoil was wrapped around some of its branches, presumably to imitate tinsel.  The plant was shivering slightly as though in a draft, and the tinfoil sparkled in Fisher’s lights.

“So I thought we’d start with some eggnog and carols,” Lovelace began, grinning widely at them. “Dinner at 1800. Then we can do more caroling and open gifts!”

“Were we supposed to bring presents?” Hui whispered to Fourier.

She shrugged. “I certainly hope not.”

The caroling went about as well as could be expected, Lovelace belting out “Jingle Bells” with Rhea providing accompanying whistles and beeps. Fisher joined in at first out of some kind of suicidal loyalty, but petered out before long. Lovelace did not seem to notice.

Fourier took a tentative sip of her drink.

“No way this is eggnog,” she said, wrinkling her nose not so much from the unpleasentness of the taste as the strangeness of the texture.

“Is not,” Selberg told her over Lovelace’s enthusiastic chorus of “Angels We Have Heard on High”. “I synthesized substitute from mucous membrane of some carnivorous plant specimens.”

Fourier had been squeezing another blob of liquid out into her mouth. She choked and pushed the baggie of ‘eggnog’ away.

“Oooh,” Hui said. “I’ll have yours if you don’t want it.”

They had honest-to-god turkey for dinner, and rehydrated cranberries and a root that tasted like a parsnip but was bright blue from the greenhouse and mashed potatoes that, once freed from their foil wrapped portions, got absolutely _everywhere_. The crew was enjoying themselves more and more, the food and the casual atmosphere getting them all into the holiday spirit. Even Lambert was beginning to relax, serious wrinkles in his brow relaxing.

The food was amazing, and when they had finished stuffing themselves Fourier smiled in a turkey induced happiness. The lights seemed to be sparking extra brightly, like miniature suns. Like miniature Wolf 359’s. She pointed this out to Fisher, complimenting his engineering prowess. He grinned back at her.

Selberg had an arm wrapped around Hui and was singing offkey in Russian. Fourier looked to Lovelace, wanting to thank her for such a beautiful evening. The captain had tears in her eyes.

“Captain!” Fourier said, concerned. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s just…” Lovelace whispered, “so beautiful. All of this.” She gestured around her and accidentally knocked a lightbulb, sending the string spinning through the air.

“Oh captain,” Fourier said, feeling tears come to her own eyes, “it is. And all thanks to you!”

“Please,” Lovelace said, grasping Fourier’s hand, “call me Isabel.”

Lambert and Fisher were now singing ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlmen’, getting increasingly louder, competing with whatever Selberg was singing.

Rhea whistled urgently.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Lovelace said. “We’re all fine Rhea.”

Fourier turned some lazy cartwheels. The ‘Christmas tree’ turned cartwheels with her. Fourier giggled, and grabbed some of its branches, swinging it around the room in a dance.

“I made sugar cookies!” Lovelace exclaimed.

The assembled crew cheered.

Lovelace brought out a specimen box filled with cookies.

The crew tore into them enthusiastically. Fourier gave a couple to the ‘Christmas tree’, and named it Simone. The ‘Christmas tree’ shook its glittering branches at her in thanks.

Rhea beeped at them. No-one payed her any mind.

They sang more Christmas carols. They had seconds of the blue parsnip stuff. The ‘Christmas tree’ ate globs of mashed potatoes off the walls. Selberg brought more of the ‘eggnog’ from his lab. Lovelace grinned and grinned and her crew grinned back.

Fourier didn’t think she’d ever had a more wonderful Christmas. She said so to Hui, who was nodding off, head bobbing just above her shoulder. He mumbled a sleepy agreement.

“Don’t you fall asleep,” she poked him, sending him floating across the lab. “We haven’t had presents yet.”

“Presents?” Hui mumbled. He was adorable.

Lovelace gave everyone handmade cards with images of the Earth twinkling blue in a black sky, ‘Merry Christmas’ spelled out in red and green lights around it.

Lambert dashed to the communications room. A moment later his voice came over the speakers. “Merry Christmas Everyone” he said, and played a recording of Handel’s Messiah.

Selberg’s gift to the crew was a recipe he had devised to synthesize coffee from seaweed. “We do not need it now,” he said, “but based on current rate of coffee intake, we will run out before end of mission.”

Fisher gave a long impassioned speech about how much he loved working with the crew and pressed a bolt into everyone’s hand. It was a very symbolic bolt. Lambert broke down in silent tears.

Hui and Fourier had a brief council, neither of them having thought of what they could give their crewmates. They ended up presenting one of their nearly-finished star charts, giggling their way through an explanation of apparent magnitude and spectral density.

The evening wound down around 2230, the crew floating back to their quarters, bouncing gently off the walls, humming Christmas carols.

 

* * *

 

 

Fourier woke up to the sound of knocking driving spikes into her skull.

“Mrrrrrrrrph,” she complained.

Rhea whistled.

“’S unhelpful Rhea,” Fourier said.

Rhea beeped smugly.

“I don’t even know what happened?” Fourier told her.

Rhea whistled.

“The blue parsnip stuff got us all high?” Fourier asked. “I should’ve known not to trust something that fluorescent.”

Fourier floated slowly to her door, where the knocking continued, and pulled it open saying, “Listen I will gladly take a flamethrower to all of Selberg’s damn plants I just need about four Tylenols.”

There was no-one outside her door.

Fourier looked up.

Floating happily, bits of tinsel hanging from its branches, was the ‘Christmas Tree’.

“Simone?” Fourier said. “I was nearly sure you were a hallucination.”

Lovelace’s voice crackled over the speakers, sounding about 600% less chipper than it had the previous evening.

“Crew,” she groaned. “We are taking the morning off. Selberg will be around with aspirin soon. And I swear to go Lambert if you ever say ‘I told you so’….”

Fourier groaned in relief and headed back to her bed, Simone following her.

“Also,” Lovelace added, “has anyone seen the Christmas tree?”

**Author's Note:**

> How did Lovelace bake sugar cookies? Probably something like [this](http://therealraewest.tumblr.com/post/124931030542/eiffel-so-i-could-cook-these-cookies-at-400) :P  
> If Rhea reminds you of R2-D2 in her mode of speech that is because I am Star Wars trash.


End file.
